Behind the Cover Story: Dave Eggers on Imagining the Future World of Over-Sharing

Dave Eggers, author of eight books, including “The Circle,” out next week from Knopf, wrote this week’s cover story, an adaptation from his new novel. It tells the story of Mae Holland, a young woman whose life becomes subsumed by her work when she’s hired at the world’s most powerful Internet company.

What inspired you to write “The Circle”? Was there one specific event, or was the idea something that you had been considering for a while?

I started taking notes for the book about three years ago, but it wasn’t prompted by any one event. It was more of a slow accumulation of material that finally coalesced when Mae Holland emerged as the protagonist. Once I could see the world of the Circle through her eyes, it began to come together.

When you were writing the book, were you thinking of any one particular company — Google, Facebook, etc.?

Definitely not. I’ve never visited any tech campus, and I don’t know anything in particular about how any given company is run. I really didn’t want to. I wanted the Circle to be entirely separate, a company that has subsumed every major company by unifying all of the disparate services now offered. I do think it could happen.

What sort of discussion would you ideally like to see this book inspire?

Any kind of discussion is fine by me. I think we’re already engaged in a constant and meaningful examination of how the available technology is affecting us — but maybe fiction can shine a different kind of light on it.

How much research did you do to prepare to write the novel? And how did you do it?

There were a handful of times when I looked something up, or asked the opinion of someone more tech-savvy than I am, but for the most part this was just a process of pure speculative fiction.

In both the book and the excerpt, the company is dominated by young people, almost all who are in thrall to the Circle. Are you surprised at all at how easily younger generations have adopted social media and happily given up their privacy?

Every generation swims in different water. I grew up doing all my homework in front of the TV, which baffled my parents and horrified my grandmother. Now younger people toggle between far more media and devices than I ever could, and I’m assuming they somehow make it work. The privacy part, though — that seems to be an area that’s still being worked out.

Throughout the novel, Mae is overwhelmed by a feeling of bleakness, “a black tear,” and she can really only relieve it by returning to her desk and answering customers’ questions — though even that doesn’t always provide the comfort she would like. Can you talk about that experience for her?

Mae finds a kind of predictable comfort in her Customer Experience work. She answers the customer queries, which are never all that difficult, then she gets an immediate rating, 1-100, from the customer. If she doesn’t get a 100, she can always appeal to the customer to know how she could have done better. That way she ends up with a 99 or 100 no matter what. That kind of immediate gratification, hundreds of times a day, becomes the norm for her, and becomes addictive. Her interactions with actual people are more chaotic, and there isn’t a simple rating system — so the choice between a confusing real-world interpersonal life and a more predictable, rating-driven online life becomes difficult. Well, not so difficult for her. She chooses the latter, but then feels, periodically, this black tear inside, a devouring void. Mae’s challenge is figuring out what that void is and how she might fill it.

Part of what is terrifying about the book is how easy it is to imagine the products the Circle presents becoming real things. SeeChange, small cameras that let users share live-stream footage, for instance. It’s easy to imagine much of this as our reality at some point. When you were writing the book, were you thinking about this at all?

I wanted the Circle technology to seem logical and likely in the not-distant future. More than a few times, though, I had to make adjustments when I thought I’d invented some scary new product or feature, only to find it already existed or was on its way.

Your novel imagines that social-media sharing will only increase, and for people who resist, well, I don’t want to give anything away, but you certainly don’t describe a happy future. Do you think we’re past a point when the culture can change, and if not, are there steps you imagine people taking?

I have to admit I have no idea. I really don’t know what will happen next. I have some fears, for sure, and the novel was a way to shape those fears into a narrative, and give them to you, the reader. Sorry in advance.

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age.Read more…